Long requested and pretty much the biggest Elder Scrolls project I’ve done so far in terms of scale... The purpose of this was to get a large-scale concept of what a city of this size would really be like in real life, removed from gameplay and technical limitations ArtStation: www.artstation.com/artwork/xDa4gY Soundtrack: ‘Uncharted Lands' - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
It's what drove me nuts about cities in Skyrim. Before you notice you can kinda suspend the disbelief, but as soon as you notice it's impossible to shake how bleeding tiny it is. Like there are more guards than townsfolk in most cities. The bandits outside a city generally outnumber the entire city. Especially seems egregious with the Forsworn and Markarth, with how they are trying to infiltrate, when they could seemingly just walk in the front door. They are more organised than the bandit groups to boot.
Irc the Imperial City is the most important urban center in Tamriel by far. About 110.000 people live in Daggerfall, so it'd make sense for the defacto capital of the continent to have as many people as ancient Rome, or one million residents, give or take. So in Oblivion, those 50 residents represent 20000 people each.
Of course, that "one million" number is just me speculating, buuut, the population of Daggerfall being 110.000 people IS canon. And we can safely assume that a random city in High Rock probably does not have more people than the literal capital of the continent.
@@TheKolboShow Bro, Daggerfall is not a "random city" it's the capital city of High Rock and thus the biggest city in the province. But I do agree with your speculation of the Imperial city's population numbers.
It certainly won't be to this scale, but there's a Morrowind mod project I love called Province: Cyrodiil that adds Cyrodiil into Morrowind according to older and weirder 2002-era lore. The Imperial City hasn't been added in and likely won't for a while, but the scale will be noticably larger than TESIV. According to their development map, the Imperial City will be very large
@@rosesareredbutzerglingssti9290 Not on Gamebryo you're not :D As long as Bethesda is stuck using that engine as a base for their own engines, it will always be the same story - save bloating compact worlds with very artificial lifeforms.
Now THIS feels like the capital of the Empire, embedded in the heart of Cyrodiil. A huge, sprawling city built by the Ayleids at the very height of their power. A white stone fortress with titanic walls that are strategically incapable of being scaled, wrapping around the entire city, dotted with sentinel bastilles, reinforced doors, and lined with nearly endless streets. The harbor being a nexus of trade, commerce, and travel, the beating heart of the city. The White-Gold Tower visible for miles and miles, from almost every corner of the province, an unmistakable landmark that shows the very size and might of the Empire. A symbol of the emperor and a reminder of man's humble beginnings and just how far St. Alessia's prayers have come. I know we will never see a fully-sized and to-scale Tamriel, but this helps paint that picture.
@@Fusion05 i hope bethesda crumbles and microsoft dumps em before having a new studio that actually cares about making good games take the fallout and TES ips....
I think this is underestimating a Rome like sized city. Rome was feed by massive grain fleets. The IC was equal or larger to Rome. So it would have a larger amount of ships in the water. A quick Google search has one site estimating Portus Romes port got something like 16 or so incoming ships daily. Larger than Rome at it's peak by some estimates.
@@HA-gu1qk It was because they were limited by the technology of the time. Skyrim would have made more sense to come first with Oblivion afterwards but seeing how Bethesda really scaled down the world in every game, it only makes sense that they would do the same thing again.
I still remember that moment as I was walking along the road from Chorrol to Bruma, halfway up the mountains, when the trees on my right fell away and I had an unobstructed view over the game's landscape. Seeing the White-Gold Tower jutting up out of the landscape - not a painted skybox, but an actual 3D object I could see from a distance of several in-game miles away - was a _revelation_ at that time. Bethesda didn't _invent_ the use of low-LOD impostors, but they used it to _such_ great effect in Oblivion. That's why the tower has a special place in my heart.
Still a fun little tidbit, because you can see it in Skyrim (though much harder to find than the Red Mountain) and ESO. In Skyrim it's semi-physical and unless you OOB to it it's only visible when you rise up at the end of Meridia's quest
It's probably called the Orange Road and I used to go there often to train my athleticism and archery, still vividly remember going off the beaten track and losing myself in the sheer immersion with the wild nature when suddenly the veil of the forest would lift and the grand imperial tower would stand in the far south like a glimmering spike in the mystical warm hue of the day's last sunshine - simply breathtaking!!
I remember Michael kirkbride commenting on his satisfaction regarding the final result and release of Oblivion, EXCEPT for its rendering of the City, which he felt that, as much effort and time had been put into, was quite shy of the epicness and grandiosity that the Empire’s capital deserved. More than any other city that could be depicted. I wonder if he would smile watching this video.
@@imperialinquisition6006I think that's lore accurate actually. Previous Dominions had actual reasons behind them. The current Dominion is just a pale imitation guided by hate. One might call them the Elder Scrolls version of a Reich?
Not too far off, considering that Cyrodiil used to be more tropical, before Tiber Septim used CHIM to make it more temperate (it's complicated and convoluted).
A game set inside of the Imperial City where you’re a detective trying to solve a murder or take down a group of thieves would be awesome. Clearly a lore-accurate Imperial City would be big enough for something like that.
You'd barely get down one whole street before you started persistently hallucinating "You are over encumbered" in the upper left corner of your visual field :D
@@redwitch12 no u'd get Vampire's disease from the sewers and burn to death before you got the cure. but on the other hand ur agility and acrobatics would be 100 100 if this were the scale of the game lol
I still remember playing Morrowind and imagining the Empire far off, living in the ruins of an ancient Elvish city, imagining it still swallowed by jungle... but millions of people living there.
The more detail you start to add into the city, the bigger the scope becomes of this project. This was definitely made with the idea of giving a bird's eye view, rather than going into greater detail.
That was one of the parts of the Imperial City that I liked the least. How are people going to mock Skyrim’s towns for being “empty villages” when there’s a whole lot of empty space in the Imperial City in Oblivion?
I always imagined that in-canon, the Imperial Arboretum is just a giant expanse of idyllic farms, fields, and orchards, which are used to feed the entire city
@@Watchmanskey The imperial foodstuff ingredients are surrounding imperial island but never actually displayed in game because of hardware issues that for the most part limited the software issues.
I prefer to think that a realistic Imperial City would be to have a small ringed Ayleid core, similar to what you see in Oblivion, but outside the walls is a massive disorganized metropolis, similar to ancient Rome. Inside the walls would be the wealthiest and highest ranking in the Empire, with the wide streets and advanced sewer system. But outside the walls would be all the peasants living in ramshackle flats with few amenities. The neatly organized wheel of the original Ayleid city would contrast with the spaghetti mess of the rest of the city outside.
Exactly what I thought. The Imperial City we saw in Oblivion is just the city's inner ring, where all the nobles and rich merchants live. I imagined the outer rings to look like Shiganshina or Trost from Attack on Titan
I agree. the scale of this seems like it is the city in the current era, but obviously thousands of years ago when the walls were being built there were less inhabitants, so the main ring should be smaller.
Это по сути представление Жителя Империи об окружающих его варварах, хотя нет никаких доказательств, что в Риме было именно так. Любые античные города очень большие и цельно-развитые. Это в современную эру почти везде появились гетто, но в древнем мире никаких следов гетто не наблюдается.
Well with very efficient Culling methods this is possible, but you'd first have to design, model and populate that entire city which is bigger than New York which by then would be such a long time that Brain Computer Interfaces would probably already exist.
It wouldn't be a good game. Sheer scale can only do so much. It is not at all feasible to pack so many streets and neighborhoods with meaningful content. To say nothing of the fact that this would NEED to be procedurally generated (which is infinitely more difficult to pull off with cities than it is with wilderness). You'd end up with a Starfield situation all over again. The hard cap has to do with human resources and we've hit that a long time ago.
@@bacc3088 Except one day processing may be able to handle it. And you could have 13,500 game designer AI, each with a unique approach, and 25,000 writer AI complete amazing volume after volume of simulated work. It now strikes me as unethical so people--let's not do that. But we're probably going to. Sigh.
For more realism, one would have to imagine that there should be lots of farms on City Isle, and along the shores of Lake Rumare. Though it is possible to imagine that there are a lot of productive food gardens within the walls of the city.
Leo mentioned Tenōchtitlān so there may be a lot of floating gardens-like structures (chināmitl) around the lake, feeding the city with food year round.
@@Daniel-nf1gq Not always. The Empire that relies hugely on imported goods can't be strong. They need solid base (at the very least, solid supply lines) before they can even think about expansion
If you look at the Pocket Guide to the Empire, v1 that was shipped with Redguard back in the '90s, you'll see that the lore-accurate Imperial City is actually a collection of disparate islands heavily urbanised and built up in almost Venetian fashion, with a lot of waterways. Imo it's a lot cooler than the generic fantasy circle-city we see in Oblivion and later. You can see how this would have looked if you search for Project Tamriel's interpretation. I really love how the Waterfront district looks in this video, though.
yeah unfortunately with oblivion Bethesda decided to just turn the imperial city into Rome Lite , and imperials into the Romans. Early lore basically didn't actually have a proper Imperial race, in Arena and Daggerfall it was just a melting pot city, Morrowind onwards it did start having them as their own race, but they were still a lot more interesting. even funnier, the original race to be roman and greek inspired was the Argonians.
The historical equivalent of Imperial City would the capital of the Abbasid Empire, the Round City of Baghdad. The ancient city was surrounded by perfectly circular 3 layer of walls, penetrated by 4 gates, with the palace and gardens in the centre
another breathtaking recreation, I love the small details of the lights outside of walls at night, of coarse some people would live there, and the ships and boats make it feel so much more alive. your interpretations of the elder scrolls world is captivating
Prior to oblivion, this was the original concept of the Imperial city. One dev mentioned that it was supposed to be so big that parts of the city were abandoned and the jungle began to grow back in the ruins. Then LOTR came out and Bethesda decided they wanted discount Minas Tirith for oblivion
It's still iconic. Your caustic personality isn't going to change the fact Bethesda wasn't always a conveyor belt of poor decisions. They were at one time extremely and reliably successful.
If you played oblivion vanilla or modded, you can see how much farming goes on there. Basically the entire middle is farmable, except swamp in the south and mountains in the far north.
I remember when I first played Oblivion, I was absolutely shocked at how tiny the imperial city was. Even within the technical limitations of the time it was just astonishing that this mini golf course was unironically intended to feel like a big city
You're kind of on point with that. The Adamantine Tower, the oldest structure in Tamriel, is actually a spaceship used and abandoned by the Aedra. And the tower shown here, the White-Gold Tower, is built as an imitation of the Adamantine Tower by the Ayleids.
now THAT is a city. Long waited for this rendition, and you didn't disappoint. Really what I imagined the IC to look like. Though I lowkey hoped for a street view 🥲 Anyways, it still looks incredible. Fantastic work 💯
I *LOVE* your lore-accurate Elder Scrolls cities series! They're always breathtakingly beautiful and are always really fun to look at for hours on end. Keep it up!
That's pretty colossal when you look at how high it towers over the rest of the buildings of the city. Buildings that are implied to be at least two stories
I think it’s hard to put size into perspective from this bird’s eye view. If we got a street-view, I think it would be pretty enormous - you can look at the ships in the harbour for reference, I guess?
When you think back to the Great War of the 4th Era, this is the expanse that the Legion and Thalmor fought upon. Just imagine the sheer amount of urban combat... must be overwhelming on all fronts.
Lol no. That cuck never had any vision. Kirkbride and others were the people who had that. Toddler has always been a glorified snake oil salesman and grifter.
That sounds cool until you consider what such a game would entail. It would take decades to make and cost thousands of dollars for each copy. The computer needed to run it would cost at least $10k. Even the shortest quest would take hours. Content would be spread so thin 99% of game time would just be walking. Most of the game would never be seen since fast travel would be used for any distance larger than a few city blocks. No one would beat it, few would buy it, and even Amazon would hesitate to take such a financial risk. The closest game nowadays to that scale would be Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode, and even that isn't much larger than a US State.
I think the best balance between gameplay, realism and epicness would be simply to feature fragments of the world and have the player travel between them. Dragon Age: Origins did it well in my opinion. Denerim felt like a huge city and devs didn't have to design any districts irrelevant to the plot.
Why have we never had an actual series or film made in this universe? There's so much content rich stories to be had from the lore its gotta be done soon!
exactly - looking at stuff like this really makes you wish for a TES show or film. These scenes look like "establishing shots" before the camera cuts to a scene of people living their life in these environs
@@rudde7918 Exactly this. When I was young and naive, I wanted this for every game I liked and would play it out in my head, to great effect. But now that I'm older, I know how corrupt the industry is and see exactly what "film adaptation" does to IPs.
If you take a few notes as constructive criticism: There is a distinct lack of public spaces: There should be markets, agorae, huge public and private buildings breaking up the monotony of the city. There should be a lot more smaller temples, resembling in shape of the bigger ones but more scattered around the city. There should be a lot more arenas or amphitheaters, universities, schools, all kinds of public buildisng which we know are present in the imperial cities. There should be public parks, intersections with a lot more open space and such. These are for added realism, you did a great job at bringing the City to scale!
@@leonesytigresyosos2695 That can be explained, at least, in two ways. One, human psychology. We love seeing nature. It’s healthy for us, subconsciously. Two, imagine they’re all fruit-bearing. They would HAVE to be, given that the city is surrounded by mountains unsuitable for growing crops. The ONE TWO-LANE ROADWAY into the entire city is already going to have 24/7/365 snout to cart traffic in both directions. Every moment of every day. An entire profession will have to be created and given imperial-level rank of “We can do whatever we want” in order to keep it flowing. If it stops, the city starves. If it slows, the city starves slowly. Having your own fruit trees in your yard would help mitigate the unfathomable costs of food. But if you can afford to live in the city, you can probably afford the food, anyway.
If it were to be even more realistic the city would have to be entirely surrounded by fields and farms, with such a concentration of population it is absolutely necessary to feed it. In any case, it's magnificent.
These scenes look so good! The night renders are my absolutely favourite. It looks so real and detailed :D Man I wish there would be games like this. At this point it would probably be a life simulation where people flee from reality ^^
Gotta do Lore Accurate Alinor with its "impossibly high towers" and spires that look like they're made of glass or insect wings that cast rainbows across the city. Not the store-brand Rivendell we got in ESO.
Y'all have bad opinions on Alinor. Alinor and the whole of Summerset is gorgeous in ESO. Best architecture in the series hands down. You can't say it's not beautiful in game because it is. Fits the high elves very well.
@@senatuspopulusqueromanus2082 Yes it is. It's incredibly good. Y'all have bad opinions of Alinor in ESO. It's gorgeous. The architecture has so much life and detail in it. Feels like an actual paradise. Actual heaven. That's what the Summerset Isles effectively are - heaven. There's no better place in Tamriel to live a peaceful life.
I love the little camera jiggle in the images. gives a very different flavour to the images and makes it believable! I definitely thought of rome or florence with these close-to-the-roof shots Awesome work!
Oblivion would've been crazy if the Imperial City was this big! I would just get lost in there for hours and have fun wandering around. Thank you kind sir for this amazing portrayal of the city well love!
God that’s amazing. Even the rings are just smaller cities meant to support the capital. Wish we could see levels of cities like this and get lost in them to find numerous side quests scattered throughout them.
The enormity of the Imperial City as depicted here, if it's more true to scale than its game equivalent, makes me wonder how the Aldmeri Dominion encircled and captured it in the Great War. You'd need inconceivable numbers and an even more inconceivable logistical machine to besiege it.
I think what I love the most out of this is that, while a lot of the other cities have a scale that is believable for a medieval society (even if still pushing on the extreme side of things for that), the imperial city has the scale of a full-blown modern day one, adding so much to the feeling of how fantastical and low-key mythical it is to the others and seeming all the more like the heart of an unimaginably huge continental empire The fact it even looks completely planned in construction just really adds to how much of a different beast and outlier it is to the rest of the world. It's the kind of thing that would make the heart of some local from daggerfall or skyrim stop upon seeing it
that night time shot just took the cake, amazing, i think it would take a few days just to get out of the tutorial sewers with a city this big, we can only dream of a day when this might be possible ingame, keep up the good work tho
This is stunning. It feels SO much like how a capital of a Tamriel-wide empire SHOULD feel. I'd love to see some cities from Morrowind too! Balmora or Vivec or even Ald'Ruhn I think would look so unique
I would have loved to see a single district in a walk-through - the palace, the market or the waterfront. But I suppose the project's scope was already so huge that modeling the interior would have been a whole other treck. Maybe in the future we could get one?
I really enjoy watching this for its visuals. It's a beautifully realised vision. I can't say I'd enjoy trying to play it as a _game,_ because I don't think it'd be terribly fun to walk for two hours to get over the other side of the city for whatever random fetch-quest I'd been sent on.
The only thing that's missing, (in all fairness, is often forgotten in fantasy world building) where is all the farm land? A city that size would require an immense amount of food to sustain itself, even if they did get regular deliveries from the other cities and provinces. Even still though, awesome work 🙂
When I first played Oblivion I actually quit the game after entering the imperial city, because I couldn't handle the disconnect of what felt like fifty houses fronting as an empire's capital (I actually only finished the game last year). This on the other hand is a place that feels real, the central hub of a continent and a place where a thousand different stories are taking place at the same time, not just your character's. That stunning nighttime shot was great for giving the city a lived-in feel. Do you plan to do another one where you get a bit closer to selected streets?
At this scale even the bridge leading to the city would be so large it would be like a whole town in itself. I’m imagining huts, shops, brothels, and inns set up along the way.
Glad to see you branching out to other games in the Elder Scrolls series, I'd love to see some Morrowind in the future. The Vivec City would make an amazing video, it was supposed to be so much more than what ended up in the game due to technical limitations. The capital city of Morrowind - Mournhold would also make a great video.
Long requested and pretty much the biggest Elder Scrolls project I’ve done so far in terms of scale... The purpose of this was to get a large-scale concept of what a city of this size would really be like in real life, removed from gameplay and technical limitations
ArtStation: www.artstation.com/artwork/xDa4gY
Soundtrack: ‘Uncharted Lands' - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
My brother in Christ, you can't leave us hanging with a 90 seconds video. This masterpiece deserves more attention! Give us a zoom in or smt!
@@olavops1000right?! I’d watch a whole series dedicated to showcasing every part of the city
So like GTA?
What's the radius?
Shouldn't the tower be taller?
you mean to say the emperor does not only rule over seventeen people
give some respect! Almost twenty
@@TreacGags There are literally not more than 20 people in single district
@@janog.5170 phew, good thing there are more than one district
Epic and true comment xD
It's what drove me nuts about cities in Skyrim. Before you notice you can kinda suspend the disbelief, but as soon as you notice it's impossible to shake how bleeding tiny it is. Like there are more guards than townsfolk in most cities. The bandits outside a city generally outnumber the entire city. Especially seems egregious with the Forsworn and Markarth, with how they are trying to infiltrate, when they could seemingly just walk in the front door. They are more organised than the bandit groups to boot.
That's a lot of buildings for the 50 inhabitants that dwell within the Imperial City in Oblivion
@@vonfaustien3957 TES urban centers basically didnt grow in scale since Morrowind lol
@@miguelpereira9859they got smaller actually, hence the imperial city having less people than vivec city
Irc the Imperial City is the most important urban center in Tamriel by far. About 110.000 people live in Daggerfall, so it'd make sense for the defacto capital of the continent to have as many people as ancient Rome, or one million residents, give or take.
So in Oblivion, those 50 residents represent 20000 people each.
Of course, that "one million" number is just me speculating, buuut, the population of Daggerfall being 110.000 people IS canon.
And we can safely assume that a random city in High Rock probably does not have more people than the literal capital of the continent.
@@TheKolboShow Bro, Daggerfall is not a "random city" it's the capital city of High Rock and thus the biggest city in the province.
But I do agree with your speculation of the Imperial city's population numbers.
You could set an entire TES game in the Imperial city accurately scaled to Lore and it would still be the largest TES we've had since Daggerfall.
I'd love to see that. Alas people are keen on their "open worlds" - so called.
Maybe one day we can be able to play a TES game set in a more realistic and real-life scaled world of Nirn.
Sounds like Assassin Creed type of game
It certainly won't be to this scale, but there's a Morrowind mod project I love called Province: Cyrodiil that adds Cyrodiil into Morrowind according to older and weirder 2002-era lore. The Imperial City hasn't been added in and likely won't for a while, but the scale will be noticably larger than TESIV. According to their development map, the Imperial City will be very large
@@rosesareredbutzerglingssti9290 Not on Gamebryo you're not :D
As long as Bethesda is stuck using that engine as a base for their own engines, it will always be the same story - save bloating compact worlds with very artificial lifeforms.
The side quest "Finding the cat for the old lady" would be hard here!
Let's say that without help it would become the most difficult mission in the game😂
@@Marckus87 indeed, and by the way the rewards....
15 Gold Coins
Steel dagger
2 bread
And the "secret recipe" for the ultimate bread with garlic.
@Marckus87 presumably you would be asking a lot of beggars and probably asking the adventures guild for help.
Now THIS feels like the capital of the Empire, embedded in the heart of Cyrodiil. A huge, sprawling city built by the Ayleids at the very height of their power. A white stone fortress with titanic walls that are strategically incapable of being scaled, wrapping around the entire city, dotted with sentinel bastilles, reinforced doors, and lined with nearly endless streets. The harbor being a nexus of trade, commerce, and travel, the beating heart of the city. The White-Gold Tower visible for miles and miles, from almost every corner of the province, an unmistakable landmark that shows the very size and might of the Empire. A symbol of the emperor and a reminder of man's humble beginnings and just how far St. Alessia's prayers have come.
I know we will never see a fully-sized and to-scale Tamriel, but this helps paint that picture.
Is there galvanized steel though?
I hope they stick with Fallout 4 sized cities. Starfield actually had decent scale it was just extremely time consuming to travel in said cities.
Unless humanity goes extinct someone will make full-scaled Tamriel playable in the next century or so
@@user-ss4sp1mk5w Dragon fire does not crumble white stone. Wake up!
@@Fusion05 i hope bethesda crumbles and microsoft dumps em before having a new studio that actually cares about making good games take the fallout and TES ips....
Now this gives you the feels of an *Imperial City*
Thank you!
@@lion_towers3d Bethesda should call you
Some day computers will be able to do this. Give it 30 years
Yeah oblivion was disappointing as fuck! Even the capital of vvardenfel felt much larger and complex!
@@HA-gu1qkSkyrim, even more so.
The waterfront is probably my favourite part. It feels so alive with all the ships
The two bridges over to the port is my favorite part. The scale of travel is so cool. Which the camera would have went to the streets.
I think this is underestimating a Rome like sized city.
Rome was feed by massive grain fleets.
The IC was equal or larger to Rome. So it would have a larger amount of ships in the water.
A quick Google search has one site estimating Portus Romes port got something like 16 or so incoming ships daily.
Larger than Rome at it's peak by some estimates.
@@Diabolictoaster did you mean 160 cause i feel like 16 is average for a population of lik 30k
@@puppergump4117 NO AT BETHESDA ITS ALWAYS 16😅
A capital worthy of a continent.
The greatest jewel of Tamriel.
Yeah oblivion was disappointing as f
@@HA-gu1qk It was because they were limited by the technology of the time. Skyrim would have made more sense to come first with Oblivion afterwards but seeing how Bethesda really scaled down the world in every game, it only makes sense that they would do the same thing again.
ex
@@HA-gu1qkno its old thats all the lore is what matters
I still remember that moment as I was walking along the road from Chorrol to Bruma, halfway up the mountains, when the trees on my right fell away and I had an unobstructed view over the game's landscape. Seeing the White-Gold Tower jutting up out of the landscape - not a painted skybox, but an actual 3D object I could see from a distance of several in-game miles away - was a _revelation_ at that time. Bethesda didn't _invent_ the use of low-LOD impostors, but they used it to _such_ great effect in Oblivion.
That's why the tower has a special place in my heart.
Yeah it's so cool to see it randomly when walking around Cyrodiil
Still a fun little tidbit, because you can see it in Skyrim (though much harder to find than the Red Mountain) and ESO. In Skyrim it's semi-physical and unless you OOB to it it's only visible when you rise up at the end of Meridia's quest
It's probably called the Orange Road and I used to go there often to train my athleticism and archery, still vividly remember going off the beaten track and losing myself in the sheer immersion with the wild nature when suddenly the veil of the forest would lift and the grand imperial tower would stand in the far south like a glimmering spike in the mystical warm hue of the day's last sunshine - simply breathtaking!!
@@VertietRyperthere is a mod where you can go to bruma and you can see it from there. I really hope they finish skyblivion one day
I remember Michael kirkbride commenting on his satisfaction regarding the final result and release of Oblivion, EXCEPT for its rendering of the City, which he felt that, as much effort and time had been put into, was quite shy of the epicness and grandiosity that the Empire’s capital deserved. More than any other city that could be depicted. I wonder if he would smile watching this video.
He called it “The city with a thousand cults”
Seeing it at this scale puts into context how horrifying the sacking of the Imperial City during Great War with the Dominion must’ve been
it's the dominion. Anything they do is horrifying. - I wouldnt even be surprised if they did human sacrifice.
@@commissarkordoshky219 For the Queen!
@@commissarkordoshky219they did summon deadra so it is likely that they used sacrifices
@@BBRocker75 I think the dominion at the time of Skyrim is a lot worse than the ESO dominion under Ayrenn.
@@imperialinquisition6006I think that's lore accurate actually. Previous Dominions had actual reasons behind them. The current Dominion is just a pale imitation guided by hate. One might call them the Elder Scrolls version of a Reich?
Searching for Armand Christophe will be difficult.
Don’t worry, we’ll get him
The journey is more important than the destination.
Metredhel spending days just to find you on the other side of Imperial City
@@alifakbar4232 Only for us to fast travel to the gates.
Indeed
Reminds me of Rome, Constantinople and Tenochtitlan, 3 in 1.
I did in fact use Ancient Rome and Tenochtitlan as more real-world reference for this!
Tenochtitlan, Rome of the West
Don’t forget atlantis
Not too far off, considering that Cyrodiil used to be more tropical, before Tiber Septim used CHIM to make it more temperate (it's complicated and convoluted).
@@TheLordboki Spain: *_helo_*
A game set inside of the Imperial City where you’re a detective trying to solve a murder or take down a group of thieves would be awesome. Clearly a lore-accurate Imperial City would be big enough for something like that.
Morrowind tribunal....
I can still hear the dark elves saying : "City of Light, the city of magic!"
Or a new "Thief" game set in the imperial city. Working your way up to rob the white gold tower of some important artifact for the thieves guild.
Or an agent of The Blades investigating a possible conspiracy against The Throne...
@@Qureas If I remember correctly, in-game books state what once upon a time, some daring thief tried just that. And his target was an Elder Scroll.
The sheer size of each district is the size of a middle size town, hot damn.
Now THAT, *THAT* is the seat of an Empire worthy of Tiber Septim's' rule.
Now THAT'S the seat of an Empire.
first day on a Minecraft lets play: dirt house
second day after a "little bit" of off screen grinding:
Imagine being a Thief's Guild and the number of houses, chests, locks that you can open >:D
You'd barely get down one whole street before you started persistently hallucinating "You are over encumbered" in the upper left corner of your visual field :D
@@redwitch12 no u'd get Vampire's disease from the sewers and burn to death before you got the cure. but on the other hand ur agility and acrobatics would be 100 100 if this were the scale of the game lol
100 lockpicking speedrun here we go!
@@redwitch12 "Have you seen Armand Christophe?" EVERYWHERE
Oh yes indeed!
I still remember playing Morrowind and imagining the Empire far off, living in the ruins of an ancient Elvish city, imagining it still swallowed by jungle... but millions of people living there.
This was beautiful. The nighttime scenes with all the lights was so cool.
Thank you for bringing this to us. I'm glad you popped up into my feed.
Cheers!
amazing, but there should be some town squares, forums and open spaces.
The more detail you start to add into the city, the bigger the scope becomes of this project. This was definitely made with the idea of giving a bird's eye view, rather than going into greater detail.
That was one of the parts of the Imperial City that I liked the least.
How are people going to mock Skyrim’s towns for being “empty villages” when there’s a whole lot of empty space in the Imperial City in Oblivion?
Check at 0:29, there are
I always imagined that in-canon, the Imperial Arboretum is just a giant expanse of idyllic farms, fields, and orchards, which are used to feed the entire city
@@Watchmanskey The imperial foodstuff ingredients are surrounding imperial island but never actually displayed in game because of hardware issues that for the most part limited the software issues.
I'm blown away by this.
This truly looks and feels like the throne of an Empire that spanned a continent. The center of civilization.
Cheers!
Baghdad
After seeing this.. I would VERY much love to see Vivec City Real Scale!
Yes!
yes plez
Vivec City, Mournhold, Sadrith Mora, and Blacklight would be breathtaking
@@Watchmanskey Daggerfall, Direnni Tower and Orsinium
Yes!
1:18 Can you imagine walking for 30min to go from the Arboretum to the Arcane University? 🤣
I’m obsessed with this and can’t stop watching! You do such a great job of bringing these cities to life! Your work is really inspiring! 🙌🏻❤️
Thank you so much!
I prefer to think that a realistic Imperial City would be to have a small ringed Ayleid core, similar to what you see in Oblivion, but outside the walls is a massive disorganized metropolis, similar to ancient Rome. Inside the walls would be the wealthiest and highest ranking in the Empire, with the wide streets and advanced sewer system. But outside the walls would be all the peasants living in ramshackle flats with few amenities. The neatly organized wheel of the original Ayleid city would contrast with the spaghetti mess of the rest of the city outside.
That’s what I always thought too
Exactly what I thought. The Imperial City we saw in Oblivion is just the city's inner ring, where all the nobles and rich merchants live. I imagined the outer rings to look like Shiganshina or Trost from Attack on Titan
I agree. the scale of this seems like it is the city in the current era, but obviously thousands of years ago when the walls were being built there were less inhabitants, so the main ring should be smaller.
Это по сути представление Жителя Империи об окружающих его варварах, хотя нет никаких доказательств, что в Риме было именно так. Любые античные города очень большие и цельно-развитые. Это в современную эру почти везде появились гетто, но в древнем мире никаких следов гетто не наблюдается.
@@Watchmanskey Still too small. Only 150 people in all of the Imperial City in Oblivion.
Now this is a city worthy of being the seat of a continental-sized empire.
I DREAM of the day when our computers can handle settings like this. Can you imagine playing in this city, first person, walking it's streets?
Well with very efficient Culling methods this is possible, but you'd first have to design, model and populate that entire city which is bigger than New York which by then would be such a long time that Brain Computer Interfaces would probably already exist.
It wouldn't be a good game. Sheer scale can only do so much. It is not at all feasible to pack so many streets and neighborhoods with meaningful content. To say nothing of the fact that this would NEED to be procedurally generated (which is infinitely more difficult to pull off with cities than it is with wilderness). You'd end up with a Starfield situation all over again. The hard cap has to do with human resources and we've hit that a long time ago.
On Vr with a haptic suite
@@bacc3088 Except one day processing may be able to handle it. And you could have 13,500 game designer AI, each with a unique approach, and 25,000 writer AI complete amazing volume after volume of simulated work.
It now strikes me as unethical so people--let's not do that. But we're probably going to. Sigh.
@@pianoman9421 Assuming the commonfolk survive this next decade or two IRL-- I think gaming will have another golden age. One day.
Now this is how the seat of an Empire should look. Awesome video!
Thank you!
Id like to see "elder scrolls legends: thief" set in a lore accurate imperial city, also bring back the climbing skill for it!
That would go hard
For more realism, one would have to imagine that there should be lots of farms on City Isle, and along the shores of Lake Rumare. Though it is possible to imagine that there are a lot of productive food gardens within the walls of the city.
Yeah, big agriculture areas should surround the IC. Skyblivion has fixed this in their mod.
Leo mentioned Tenōchtitlān so there may be a lot of floating gardens-like structures (chināmitl) around the lake, feeding the city with food year round.
I always imagined they put all the farms and orchards and fields on the Arboretum District. It's a giant expanse of idyllic pastoral lands
It's an empire, they import things
@@Daniel-nf1gq Not always. The Empire that relies hugely on imported goods can't be strong. They need solid base (at the very least, solid supply lines) before they can even think about expansion
Definitely reminds me of Rome, with a bit of influence from Tenochtitlan.
As it turns out - I used both of those as real-world references for this!
Looks like Asgard to me, lol.
If you look at the Pocket Guide to the Empire, v1 that was shipped with Redguard back in the '90s, you'll see that the lore-accurate Imperial City is actually a collection of disparate islands heavily urbanised and built up in almost Venetian fashion, with a lot of waterways. Imo it's a lot cooler than the generic fantasy circle-city we see in Oblivion and later. You can see how this would have looked if you search for Project Tamriel's interpretation. I really love how the Waterfront district looks in this video, though.
Yeah, this. The video is disappointing. it's just a scaled-up Oblivion version, not the one that was described in the lore.
yeah unfortunately with oblivion Bethesda decided to just turn the imperial city into Rome Lite , and imperials into the Romans.
Early lore basically didn't actually have a proper Imperial race, in Arena and Daggerfall it was just a melting pot city, Morrowind onwards it did start having them as their own race, but they were still a lot more interesting.
even funnier, the original race to be roman and greek inspired was the Argonians.
The historical equivalent of Imperial City would the capital of the Abbasid Empire, the Round City of Baghdad. The ancient city was surrounded by perfectly circular 3 layer of walls, penetrated by 4 gates, with the palace and gardens in the centre
The beating heart of a continental empire
another breathtaking recreation, I love the small details of the lights outside of walls at night, of coarse some people would live there, and the ships and boats make it feel so much more alive. your interpretations of the elder scrolls world is captivating
Thank you so much!
Very good work, but I think there's too many trees in the city that it looks like a forest mixed with buildings.
Prior to oblivion, this was the original concept of the Imperial city. One dev mentioned that it was supposed to be so big that parts of the city were abandoned and the jungle began to grow back in the ruins. Then LOTR came out and Bethesda decided they wanted discount Minas Tirith for oblivion
Classic Bethesda. Ruining the good things they have going for them.
It's not as though they would have done it justice even if they hadn't decided it should look like LOTR.
Todd and Emil don’t manage to fuck up their games challenge: impossible.
That being said I loved oblivion.
It's still iconic. Your caustic personality isn't going to change the fact Bethesda wasn't always a conveyor belt of poor decisions. They were at one time extremely and reliably successful.
@@SirMattomaton *_were_*
Holy crap, looks amazing, but can you imagine how much farming must go into feeding all these mouths?
If you played oblivion vanilla or modded, you can see how much farming goes on there. Basically the entire middle is farmable, except swamp in the south and mountains in the far north.
Homie’s talking like they don’t feed an entire country
seems like they using Scroll dupe exploit to get lot of food to feed so much folks
Now, this is what the true size of the Imperial City really looks like.
I remember when I first played Oblivion, I was absolutely shocked at how tiny the imperial city was. Even within the technical limitations of the time it was just astonishing that this mini golf course was unironically intended to feel like a big city
That city has "our space saucer landed here and as it sank into the mud, we built a huge city on it" vibe.
I love the visuals
Then we built another city, and that sank into the mud.
@@lgjm5562 dwemer origin story
You're kind of on point with that. The Adamantine Tower, the oldest structure in Tamriel, is actually a spaceship used and abandoned by the Aedra. And the tower shown here, the White-Gold Tower, is built as an imitation of the Adamantine Tower by the Ayleids.
now THAT is a city. Long waited for this rendition, and you didn't disappoint. Really what I imagined the IC to look like. Though I lowkey hoped for a street view 🥲 Anyways, it still looks incredible. Fantastic work 💯
Thanks so much!
I *LOVE* your lore-accurate Elder Scrolls cities series! They're always breathtakingly beautiful and are always really fun to look at for hours on end. Keep it up!
Thank you so much!
the white-gold tower is too small. it's established in Arena, that all the major towers on Tamriel are absolutely COLOSSAL.
That's pretty colossal when you look at how high it towers over the rest of the buildings of the city. Buildings that are implied to be at least two stories
Yeah that was my only fuss too.
I think it’s hard to put size into perspective from this bird’s eye view. If we got a street-view, I think it would be pretty enormous - you can look at the ships in the harbour for reference, I guess?
That's super cool. Loved the nighttime shots!
Thanks!
When you think back to the Great War of the 4th Era, this is the expanse that the Legion and Thalmor fought upon.
Just imagine the sheer amount of urban combat... must be overwhelming on all fronts.
i imagined the exact same, brutal
This is exactly how it looked - and still looks - in Todd’s brain
Lol no. That cuck never had any vision. Kirkbride and others were the people who had that. Toddler has always been a glorified snake oil salesman and grifter.
The night shots are gorgeous. Imagine if one day, we got an Elder Scrolls game that was sized accurately to the lore for the whole of Tamriel?
That sounds cool until you consider what such a game would entail.
It would take decades to make and cost thousands of dollars for each copy. The computer needed to run it would cost at least $10k.
Even the shortest quest would take hours. Content would be spread so thin 99% of game time would just be walking. Most of the game would never be seen since fast travel would be used for any distance larger than a few city blocks.
No one would beat it, few would buy it, and even Amazon would hesitate to take such a financial risk.
The closest game nowadays to that scale would be Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode, and even that isn't much larger than a US State.
I think the best balance between gameplay, realism and epicness would be simply to feature fragments of the world and have the player travel between them. Dragon Age: Origins did it well in my opinion. Denerim felt like a huge city and devs didn't have to design any districts irrelevant to the plot.
Bro this is crazy work 💯💯
Keep it up 🆙💯
Thanks!
Apart from other real historical examples mentioned, at 0:21 it very much reminds me of Gondolin
Why have we never had an actual series or film made in this universe?
There's so much content rich stories to be had from the lore its gotta be done soon!
exactly - looking at stuff like this really makes you wish for a TES show or film. These scenes look like "establishing shots" before the camera cuts to a scene of people living their life in these environs
Why would you want them to ruin another great videogame with a film or show about it?
@@rudde7918 Exactly this. When I was young and naive, I wanted this for every game I liked and would play it out in my head, to great effect.
But now that I'm older, I know how corrupt the industry is and see exactly what "film adaptation" does to IPs.
Because the lore is impenetrable; half of it reads like the ramblings borne from a 60s drug trip.
You want to give the elder scrolls the same treatment that they gave fallout?
If you take a few notes as constructive criticism:
There is a distinct lack of public spaces: There should be markets, agorae, huge public and private buildings breaking up the monotony of the city.
There should be a lot more smaller temples, resembling in shape of the bigger ones but more scattered around the city.
There should be a lot more arenas or amphitheaters, universities, schools, all kinds of public buildisng which we know are present in the imperial cities.
There should be public parks, intersections with a lot more open space and such.
These are for added realism, you did a great job at bringing the City to scale!
The place should also be surrounded by lots of farmland, or they wont have a way to feed all those people living there
And why there is a forest-like tree density within the city????
And ports. There are a lot of ships there but no docks.
@@leonesytigresyosos2695 That can be explained, at least, in two ways. One, human psychology. We love seeing nature. It’s healthy for us, subconsciously. Two, imagine they’re all fruit-bearing. They would HAVE to be, given that the city is surrounded by mountains unsuitable for growing crops. The ONE TWO-LANE ROADWAY into the entire city is already going to have 24/7/365 snout to cart traffic in both directions. Every moment of every day. An entire profession will have to be created and given imperial-level rank of “We can do whatever we want” in order to keep it flowing. If it stops, the city starves. If it slows, the city starves slowly. Having your own fruit trees in your yard would help mitigate the unfathomable costs of food. But if you can afford to live in the city, you can probably afford the food, anyway.
@@horstherbert35 They would trade for massive amounts of food using the massive harbour. No city that size is EVER self sufficient
If it were to be even more realistic the city would have to be entirely surrounded by fields and farms, with such a concentration of population it is absolutely necessary to feed it. In any case, it's magnificent.
Makes me think a bit of Ravnica from Magic: The Gathering. Didn't know the Imperial City was supposed to be that large! Pretty cool!
These scenes look so good! The night renders are my absolutely favourite. It looks so real and detailed :D Man I wish there would be games like this. At this point it would probably be a life simulation where people flee from reality ^^
Thanks!
Gotta do Lore Accurate Alinor with its "impossibly high towers" and spires that look like they're made of glass or insect wings that cast rainbows across the city.
Not the store-brand Rivendell we got in ESO.
Everything in ESO feels like the dollar version of the lore accurate version
@@angryvaultguy You are SO right about that lmao
Y'all have bad opinions on Alinor. Alinor and the whole of Summerset is gorgeous in ESO. Best architecture in the series hands down. You can't say it's not beautiful in game because it is. Fits the high elves very well.
@@ThunderTheBlackShadowKittynot even close to good
@@senatuspopulusqueromanus2082 Yes it is. It's incredibly good. Y'all have bad opinions of Alinor in ESO. It's gorgeous. The architecture has so much life and detail in it. Feels like an actual paradise. Actual heaven. That's what the Summerset Isles effectively are - heaven. There's no better place in Tamriel to live a peaceful life.
Holy guacamole this is incredible, I think you've outdid yourself! Its stunning!
Thank you so much!
Another great video.
Looking at these large-scale concepts in UE5, I try to imagine what the Capital Wasteland [Fallout 3] would look like.
Thanks!
I love the little camera jiggle in the images. gives a very different flavour to the images and makes it believable! I definitely thought of rome or florence with these close-to-the-roof shots
Awesome work!
Thanks so much!
Oblivion would've been crazy if the Imperial City was this big! I would just get lost in there for hours and have fun wandering around. Thank you kind sir for this amazing portrayal of the city well love!
Thank you so much!
God that’s amazing. Even the rings are just smaller cities meant to support the capital. Wish we could see levels of cities like this and get lost in them to find numerous side quests scattered throughout them.
Thank you!
The enormity of the Imperial City as depicted here, if it's more true to scale than its game equivalent, makes me wonder how the Aldmeri Dominion encircled and captured it in the Great War.
You'd need inconceivable numbers and an even more inconceivable logistical machine to besiege it.
Those fascist elves very much rely on magic in their evil conquests...
Now see this? THIS looks like the capital of a continent spanning empire
I think what I love the most out of this is that, while a lot of the other cities have a scale that is believable for a medieval society (even if still pushing on the extreme side of things for that), the imperial city has the scale of a full-blown modern day one, adding so much to the feeling of how fantastical and low-key mythical it is to the others and seeming all the more like the heart of an unimaginably huge continental empire
The fact it even looks completely planned in construction just really adds to how much of a different beast and outlier it is to the rest of the world. It's the kind of thing that would make the heart of some local from daggerfall or skyrim stop upon seeing it
Would love a cinematic featuring the radiant ai crowds gossiping in the background. We all love the big stones but we cant forget the chaos within
I hope "The Wayward Realms" will give us something close to such cities
Yeah, I sure hope it can deliver. I'd say the Daggerfall cities were big, but not massive. However, there were an absurd amount of them.
Now some madlad is gonna build this, to scale, in Minecraft.
Oh, that is beautiful! Now imagine a Dark Anchor directly above it.
Imagine a city this large besieged by the Aldmeri Dominion during the great war, must be a sight to see
I'm definitely seeing the Tenochtitlan vibes, as a fellow Torres, much appreciated.
that night time shot just took the cake, amazing, i think it would take a few days just to get out of the tutorial sewers with a city this big, we can only dream of a day when this might be possible ingame, keep up the good work tho
Thank you!
This is beautiful, I always wondered what the true scale of the Imperial city would look like
Great stuff thanks for this! Such an inspiring video.
Thank you!
The Imperials have 10g high speed internet and TV with that huge disc they're using. lol
This is stunning. It feels SO much like how a capital of a Tamriel-wide empire SHOULD feel. I'd love to see some cities from Morrowind too! Balmora or Vivec or even Ald'Ruhn I think would look so unique
Thank you!
I hope there's reliable public transportation in this place cuz woah
I would have loved to see a single district in a walk-through - the palace, the market or the waterfront. But I suppose the project's scope was already so huge that modeling the interior would have been a whole other treck. Maybe in the future we could get one?
I really enjoy watching this for its visuals. It's a beautifully realised vision.
I can't say I'd enjoy trying to play it as a _game,_ because I don't think it'd be terribly fun to walk for two hours to get over the other side of the city for whatever random fetch-quest I'd been sent on.
And the Adoring Fan will still find you no matter how much you try to hide.
The night time shot really sells it for me it's the Imperial capital city it should be a light polluted city at night
I can see why they made it smaller. Imagine getting lost in there for the entire game
Can you imagine the thalmor trying to invade it? Yikes that's a big city.
The only thing that's missing, (in all fairness, is often forgotten in fantasy world building) where is all the farm land?
A city that size would require an immense amount of food to sustain itself, even if they did get regular deliveries from the other cities and provinces. Even still though, awesome work 🙂
This is absolutely beautiful & captures the scale so awesomely
When I first played Oblivion I actually quit the game after entering the imperial city, because I couldn't handle the disconnect of what felt like fifty houses fronting as an empire's capital (I actually only finished the game last year). This on the other hand is a place that feels real, the central hub of a continent and a place where a thousand different stories are taking place at the same time, not just your character's. That stunning nighttime shot was great for giving the city a lived-in feel.
Do you plan to do another one where you get a bit closer to selected streets?
How the Aldmeri Dominion were able to seize this colossal moated city for a time is beyond me.
They had help from the khajiit and bosmer after taking their land.
The shots of the city at night... WOW!
Clicked so fast I didn't even know what it's about. I'm sure it's epic though.
At this scale even the bridge leading to the city would be so large it would be like a whole town in itself. I’m imagining huts, shops, brothels, and inns set up along the way.
The sewage dungeon is going to be one hell of a stanky area.
this is how I saw it as a child.
So many more houses to loot.
Gorgeous work Leo!
Thank you!
Love your works bro
Cheers!
A city 16 times the size of the whole map of Fallout 4.
~ Todd Howard chugging a Pint of Scoma
With 16 times the detail
The Imperial City is a giant transmutation circle!
Glad to see you branching out to other games in the Elder Scrolls series, I'd love to see some Morrowind in the future. The Vivec City would make an amazing video, it was supposed to be so much more than what ended up in the game due to technical limitations.
The capital city of Morrowind - Mournhold would also make a great video.
An Assassin's Creed type Elder Scrolls game in this map would be INSANE
The Coruscant of Elder Scrolls... One day we will be playing such a game!